<p>Alright, so, I'm a high schooler just entering his junior year. Because of that, I've started looking into colleges. I've always been computer oriented, so I've always wanted to go into the software engineering field. I've had a look around, and, after looking through quite a few of the 'high rated' computer science programs, Georgia Tech really stood out to me. So, I've decided to make it my "target school". I know it's a tough nut to crack, so I'm trying to take every precaution. Now, here's my stats going in to my junior year.</p>
<p>GPA: 4.0(unweighted)
College level classes completed: Spanish I and Spanish II (A's in both taking college level English and Biology this year)
ACT: 24(yes I've already taken it, but I hadn't done any preparation, I just wanted to see what it was like. I think I could easily get it up to the high twenties, possibly low thirties)
EC: I volunteered as a counselor at a summer camp for five weeks last summer, as well as seven weeks this summer. I'm fluent in both HTML and CSS, and I've taught myself the general aspects of C++. I also volunteer in an after school good news club every Tuesday during the school year at a local elementary school.</p>
<p>Now, here's my problem. See, I'm enrolled in a independent studies program with a local private school (thus I don't actually carry out courses at the school, but rather do school certified courses at many different places. Basically, it's a very sophisticated version of homeschooling minus the lack of social life), so I don't get the benefit of being able to take AP classes, nor can I be involved in student government or honors programs. What can I do to get my stats up to Georgia Tech level without such "padding" on my application? This may end up being irrelevant, since I'm trying to convince my folks to let me enroll in a local public school next year so I can bolster my credentials with EC and AP classes. Would that be sufficient.</p>
<p>Is it worth trying to take an AP exam without taking the course? If it's just a matter of studying for them, I'm quite self motivated and think I could probably handle them on my own. If not taking the course would be a real hindrance, would there be any harm in attempting an AP exam, or can that do more harm than good?</p>
<p>Are there any EC activities that you would recommend that can be done outside of the school system? </p>
<p>Basically, what should I do to give myself the best chances of being accepted in Georgia Tech?</p>
<p>I didn’t plan on it. I was more just going to note that I was well acquainted in the web design field. I realize that HTML/CSS are far too basic to be of any credential value.</p>
<p>They’re also not programming languages, so you can’t be “fluent” in them. I think that was fesago’s point - applying to a CS school and claiming that you’re fluent in HTML is like applying to a linguistics department and claiming that you’re fluent in pig latin.</p>
<p>Now, there is value in claiming your experience in web design, especially if you have .com or commercial websites under your belt. You just want to be careful how you state that experience. Words like “programming” or “fluent” have well defined meanings you need to use properly or not use at all.</p>
<p>As for your original question about EC’s - one easy way to get some EC’s outside of a traditional school is work experience. Have an after school job, or better yet, start up a small business and incorporate it. You don’t have to make a ton of money, but taking the initiative to start the business, figure out and navigate state business law, and then manage a business to profitability shows great initiative.</p>
<p>Hmm. . . I don’t remember ever claiming HTML or CSS were programming languages. By the term “fluent”, I more just meant that I knew them inside and out.</p>
<p>Oh, and, as to work experience, I’ve made over ten thousand dollars through buying and selling on Ebay and transferred almost fifty thousand dollars in gross funds throughout my time in High school. Would that be a good thing to include?</p>
<p>You have to be careful about your terminology - any reasonable person who hears “fluent” will immediately go to programming in that context. It presents a bad image. If you misrepresent yourself, that is your fault and not the fault of the reader. Your objective is to present a clear (and positive) representation of yourself, which is particularly important because you have gone through alternative schooling. Regardless of what you think about your social skills (remember: you’re inherently biased), alternatively schooled kids are viewed in a light of skepticism. It is incumbent upon you to convey that you are socially well adjusted. Not understanding how others will view your terminology is problematic.</p>
<p>As for eBay - again you have to be careful how that experience is perceived. If an adcom assumes that you sit in front of the computer for 12 hours per day buying and selling on eBay, that could be an issue. And unless you are purchasing and selling high value items, $50,000 in eBay purchases represents a substantial amount of time in front of the computer. </p>
<p>However, if you present the situation as if you had a coherent business plan, have organized your activities, have obtained outside funding, manage customer relations, etc. then it could be a very positive experience to include.</p>
<p>Alright, first, I just want to make it clear that my writing style on a public forum is dramatically different than the method I would use in formal writing. As far as I know, even English lang. text books make it a point that there is a difference between word usage in “casual” and “formal” styles.</p>
<p>Also, “HTML” stands for “Hyper Text Mark-up Language”, so whether it is a programming language or not, the word “language” is in it’s very name. Therefor, I believe the term “fluent” applies.</p>
<p>As for Ebay, I certainly didn’t “spend twelve hours a day sitting in front of a computer”. In fact, I’ve never even invested time in Ebay out side of the Christmas season. The ways I’ve been able to make the amount of money I’ve made is through careful planning and keeping an eye open for opportunities, in demand holiday items, sales, ect. . .</p>
<p>As a side note, even though some people might classify me into the “alternative schooling” category, I am technically enrolled in a accredited private school.</p>
<p>Any other advice for preparation? Preferably on additional things I could do to pad my application.</p>
<p>The point is still valid - regardless of your intention, certain words are “loaded” because they are used frequently enough that they conjure up preconceived notions in the eyes of reader in certain context. You can use these words to quickly convey an idea (e.g. being fluent in a programming language) or you can use them to create an implicit metaphor, but using them incorrectly makes you look bad. </p>
<p>For example: your comment about “Hyper Text Mark-up Language” containing the word “Language” in the name. The word in the abbreviation that describes the protocol is not “Language”, it is the compound word “Markup Language”. A markup language is not a programming language, and thus you cannot be “fluent” in it, based on society’s accepted definition of the word. If you claim otherwise to an adcom at a technical school, they will stop at that phrase and immediately move on to the next applicant. </p>
<p>Because of your comment, I have an opinion about your knowledge of programming - and it’s not a good opinion. Further I have an opinion of you as a person because of the way you responded to my post, and again it’s not a good opinion. Luckily, my opinion doesn’t matter, because it is not my decision which colleges admit you. </p>
<p>My goal isn’t to demean you or belittle you (I don’t know you and probably never will) - it’s to show you how you appear to others. You could be the most qualified student in the world, but if you appear to others to be unqualified, you’ll be rejected.</p>
<p>Study as hard as you can for the ACT. It’s possible for a complete idiot to get a 30+ score with enough hard work. Case in point: Look at the graduate boards and see how many Indians desperate to get into a technical school here have 600+ GRE verbal scores that cannot piece together one sentence that doesn’t look horribly awkward in English. It’s all about hard work.</p>
<p>“Further I have an opinion of you as a person because of the way you responded to my post, and again it’s not a good opinion.”</p>
<p>Well, that’s disappointing. That you should form an opinion of me on such an arbitrary matter. Especially considering the fact that it doesn’t seem like my response had any malicious intent but was rather just trying to defend it’s statement. My original post wasn’t meant to be a college application, and I didn’t expect it to be judged as one.</p>
<p>“Study as hard as you can for the ACT. It’s possible for a complete idiot to get a 30+ score with enough hard work.”</p>
<p>Thanks, point taken. . . and ouch, I hope you weren’t implying anything.</p>
<p>The GT admissions process is pretty easy. You’ll probably get in with your stats and go-get-em attitude. Maybe raise the SAT to a 27 to be safer as that’s “about” a 1210 old scale SAT, and that’s usually sufficient for acceptance. Many many others get in with lower. Actually, scratch the ACT and take the SAT… this isn’t the Midwest :-P</p>
<p>As for for use of “fluent”, you’re not being reviewed by CompSci majors… you’re being reviewed by bureaucrats who are seeing if you fit in. If they cared about the context of “fluency” with computer languages, they wouldn’t be adcoms. They would be business executives and computer programmers or in an HR dept working for a higher salary (although in this economy, people will take whatever they can get). If they see the words “computer” and “business/entrepreneur” then yes, you’ll fit in, because we’re all a bunch of money grubbing nerds at Tech :-). More people need to realize that adcoms are composed of trained, by-the-book bureaucrats, not specialists. Not to mention they’re going through thousands of apps per year. They give each one a few minutes. Making your case succinctly would be a plus. Just show them that you took advantage of every opportunity available (you said you took college classes since you couldn’t take AP courses, so that shows you’ll go out of your way to study course content, a very needed skill for Tech) and that you work really hard.</p>
<p>The hard part is graduating. GT doesn’t do a lot of the stuff that schools do (AA, filling a void, quotas for OOS/IS, etc.). It’s very by the numbers and making sure you’re not a sociopath or something. I mean, they don’t even care what your teachers think (at least when I applied). Fill in your own transcript. Short essay. The Tech app was the easiest I filled out for top/competitive colleges. They accept ~60% of applicants last time I checked. Schools that you’d have to worry about little things are schools like HYPSM, where they would actually send parts of your app to departments to see if they’re interested and the app process took tons of time to complete. Or where they scrutinize your app heavily to see if you have something “special” to offer. Or where an SAT of 2400 is only a 40% chance. Or where the admit rate is like 6%. For schools like that, the results are just random and scatterbrained. I know one kid who got into Stanford who wasn’t a genius, but a decent scholar (1300 SAT old scale, 3.9 GPA, top 10% but not top 10). Somehow he got in, and we all scratched our heads. Must have had one hell of a personality, LOL. Another kid we knew was “well rounded,” had passions, even did research. 2400, 4.0, etc. Got denied from HYPSM. All of them. He was just “missing something,” because kids like those who are dreams to most colleges are a dime a dozen at those schools.</p>
<p>It sounds like it’s been a while since you applied.</p>
<p>Tech has a high freshman retention rate now, and a very good freshman to graduate rate. So the difficult part is no longer “graduating”.</p>
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<p>Depending on your program, your application could be screened by a department representative. Also, the reason Tech has such a high admission rate is (much like other peer schools like Michigan and UIUC), students self-select. Everyone wants to apply to MIT because it’s “prestigious”, so many unqualified students “give it a shot”. Meanwhile, the public engineering schools don’t have nearly as prestigious of a name, so the students that apply generally of a high caliber, have done more homework, and are more committed. </p>
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<p>Not any more. A 27 would be in the bottom quartile for the ACT. </p>
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<p>I know several of those “bureaucrats”, and they certainly understand the language of programmers. It wouldn’t make sense to have a non-programmer evaluating applications. Otherwise, just ask for an SAT score and a GPA and make a decision entirely based on that. You could even do what some lower tier schools do: post your GPA and SAT cut-off. Students above are automatically admitted and students below are automatically rejected. They you don’t even need an admissions office.</p>
<p>Just because it has a high retention rate doesn’t mean it’s easy to graduate. It just means college degrees are becoming the de facto high school diplomas of the 21st century and dropping out is more heavily evaluated. Even if it means graduating with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands in debt. Most schools in the US are reporting higher retention and graduation rates for this reason, as well as more people taking >4 years to graduate.</p>
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They do this at the graduate level, not undergrad. Tech doesn’t have admissions by department for undergrad like many schools, so they all go through the admissions office. </p>
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Yes, many apply to the crapshoot schools, but to say that “so many unqualified students” is absurd. You make it sound like 80% of them couldn’t handle the workload or have the stats. The truth is, and I read this in a report once when applying to college, is that 90% of those who applied could thrive at HYPSM. However, when you have 24K kids applying for 2000 or so spots, you’re going to have to deny 22K kids no matter how qualified. HYPSM tend to have higher cohort rates; ~90% of admitted applicants accept admissions offers.</p>
<p>As for the public engineering schools, tons of in-state kids do exactly what you say and apply just to apply. When they get in, they don’t necessarily go. For example, according to the 2008-2009 common data set, GT had ~10K applicants. Of those, ~6300 were accepted (rate of 63%). Of those accepted, ~2600 accepted their offers. That means ~40% of those who GOT IN went, and just 26% of those who applied actually decide to go. No one knows how many of those students actually made it their first choice, and how many just applied and didn’t get accepted anywhere else or similar situations. However, with numbers like these, the “self selected” theory sounds less plausible. </p>
Yes, bottom quartile for those who decide to go, not for those applying. The truth is, GT admits a wider range of scores than you may think. However, it attracts many of those who didn’t get into the top 20 but are still high caliber students (thus higher scores). It also attracts those with an extreme interest in research, thus they’ll probably have higher scores as well. The school also seems discouraging for applicants who did well enough in school to get into Tech, but decided it would be too hard. That’s exactly what happened at my school senior year, and several applicants that got in decided not to go. The average score for that group on the old scale was about 1100 (I’m estimating because I heard that number a lot from them). This was only 3 years ago, BTW. </p>
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<p>I used to BE one of those bureaucrats. I’m bilingual and was responsible for recruiting Hispanic kids when I was a Sophomore, and I had to help out when the “final deadline” came about and tons of apps came in. If I saw someone in HIGH SCHOOL say they were fluent in HTML/CSS, even though I myself am CmpE, I wouldn’t care. They’re in high school, and they’re coming here to learn about the field and the industry. I wouldn’t expect them to use correct terminology and wouldn’t hold it against them. The other adcoms, who generally AREN’T versed in computer science (I had to help many of the old fogeys with the BANNER system and the OSCAR system when they gave accounts and addresses to applicants), definitely wouldn’t care and would even be impressed by it, even though HTML is simple to me and not a formal programming language like C or Java. Why do you think it doesn’t make since that a computer programmer isn’t scrutinizing apps? Computer programmers have other things to do with their time like make software. Not to mention, Computer Programming > adcom for salary. Trust me, I know that. Most of the folks peaked out at 45K in the adcom office and started in the low 30s, upper 20s. It’s just cheaper to hire someone with HR or government experience than someone who has a specialized degree like CS or CmpE to scrutinize apps.</p>
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<p>Actually, a BIG part of it is shoving those numbers through an algorithm (the FI index) and getting a number. You then compare those numbers with other applicants to see if there are any extreme outliers. We’re talking about people with <3.0 and <1000 SAT. Then, you look through the remaining apps to see if there are any characteristics you want. The upper outliers are also looked at cautiously but as highly desired. You don’t even want to know how they dole out the financial aid packages based on this… it’s just awful.</p>
<p>As for you doubting the self-selection in the application process, how else would a school with a 60% admit rate have a middle 50% SAT range of 1920-2160? My alma mater has less than half the admit rate but a middle 50% 100 points lower on both quartiles. I would argue that Tech has one of the most self-selective applicant pools in the nation.</p>
<p>As for the rest of your post, interesting (and sad) stuff…</p>
<p>So, overall, my course work is fine, due to the fact that I’m taking the hardest classes available to me; My EC’s are ok, but I could do with some formal work experience; and if I could raise my ACT score above a 30, that would be ideal. Is that correct?</p>
They do it with both schools, especially in the Atlanta area high schools schools in Cobb, Gwinnett, N. Fulton, etc… </p>
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<p>For the reasons I gave. You still have a lot of unqualified students applying as you do UGA. It’s just that more students decide to matriculate to UGA or GSU or Southern or the like because in the US, Liberal Arts is highly emphasized (one of the reasons I hated high school AND why many students get slammed when they first enter Tech’s rigorous math/science curriculum).</p>
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Indeed, it is amazing. However, what I was trying to say is that not everyone applying to Tech is trying to get in as their first choice, as G.P. Burdell made it sound. I do know that the sheer number of OOS kids alone sets in place it’s attractive engineering record. If we removed the in state kids who apply just to apply and tried to accept the same number of students (from OOS), we wouldn’t have enough room. We would then have to lower our admit rate.</p>
<p>Yes, raise that score. A 30 will make you competitive. I said 27 earlier as a minimum to shoot for because it shows you can do the work competently. People have gotten in with much lower (<em>cough</em> M-Train<em>cough</em>), but, you know, why keep it lower if you can do better? Just remember: it’s an exam and do not get nervous or let it overtake your life. When I took the SAT at Walton (my testing area at the time), you’d be surprised how many came and were just terrified, on edge, over-caffinated, and muttering/chanting mathematical formulas. IDK if the same is true for ACT takers (they seem to be less on edge from the group I knew in high school who took it… very nice folks). It may have also been the area I was in (East Cobb = competitive students). Eat a good breakfast and get plenty of rest (this really works, I swear). Wake up and take a brisk walk to get the blood flowing. Take several practice exams (from the CB or ACT board themselves) the weeks following up to the exam, at first with no time limit then adding it in. It’s usually the most adequate practice. Unfortunately, for verbal/English/reading sections, there’s not as much as you can do now. If you read a decent bit throughout your life, you should do fine. You can always try reading books and enhance reading comp. As for math, the tests are soooooo similar and familiar. Just doing the practice exams will be enough to raise your score (I know that a broad brush to paint, but in most people’s experience, it’s true). </p>
<p>And, do make that essay meaningful. You’d be surprised that, even though it’s a Tech school, how important it can be. Lower scored people have gotten in because of the passion and dedication they show in the essay, and how many qualified people look like they threw it together in 10 minutes because “it’s a Tech school, they don’t care.”</p>